May 24, 2013

As part of her continuing studies an Anja Skrba has translated ZOIS‘s somewhat elderly page on XML and OLTP into Serbo-Croatian and put it up on a public web-hosting site. Thanks for that, and if there’s anything that ZOIS can do in return let us know.

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March 26, 2013

Tuxedo, the Transaction Processing Monitor, was a large part of what ZOIS did. And there’s enough of it still about to cause the odd commission query. These sadly seem to be far away and require more effort than your correspondent is capable of, now he is in his medical-inspired dotage. He’s still up for the odd gig, but please, part-time, and with as little thrashing around strange Airports and Railway Stations in the wee-small hours as possible.

Not necessarily from Tennessee

So it came to pass that somebody ask if a hand could be lent to a customer who was still on Tuxedo 6.5. Tuxedo has passed through several hands since 6.5, and if memory serves, this particular version was out of service in the last century. But customers were, indeed still are, wedded to 6.5, for it was considered by many as the last proper ‘fast’ Tuxedo. Tuxedo is now owned by Oracle and on version 12g, by the way. Sadly this otherwise interesting blast-from-the-past had to be declined for it was in Sydney, Australia.

Importantly for anybody contemplating a move from Tuxedo 6.5 to a later Tuxedo was the Threads Issue. This was the major problem with Tuxedo 7.0 that everybody condemned as being ‘crap’. 7.0 was the version where somebody thought it was a good idea to have multi-threaded Servers. It wasn’t. The fix, introduced in Tuxedo 8.0, was to switch-off the largely redundant but expensive thread-dispatcher and leave the oh-so-clever multi-threaded Processing Agents to the now, sadly, defunct Encina.

The magic environment variable setting is:

TMNOTHREADS=Y

This is the famous but poorly-documented “make Tuxedo go faster” variable.

For all you ‘stuckists’ out there, moving to a more modern Tuxedo does have a number of advantages. As well as the obvious ones, fixes and support from Oracle as an example, it allows the use of a whole load of more modern features. Most of these are bolt-on jobs, granted, but useful all the same. One thinks of SALT, but there are others. Not least it allows the specification of Transport End-points symbolically, You can remove all the mapped-sockaddr (“0x0002″) addresses and replace them with ‘proper’ //name:port ones. Believe the author, Dear Reader, when he writes that this makes Bulletin Board Configuration files a lot easier to maintain.

Anyhow, if you’re the person who got the Sydney gig, and you’ve been inspired by this post, I hope that you’re charging them a suitably large fee.

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September 19, 2012

Today, 19th September, we’ve had one or two network problems. We were off the air for a couple of periods, I’d estimate a hour or two at most in the afternoon. This seemed to be upstream from the ZOIS estate and appear fixed now. The scrapers are playing catch-up and for once it wasn’t down to me, my dodgy kit, or banana fingers.

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April 5, 2012

Clerity Solutions who had acquired what was known as SUN’s Mainframe Rehosting product, and better known by its original and now current moniker, UniKix, has itself been acquired by Dell. UniKix is the long-standing CICS clone. So, Dell are going to have a pop at the Mainframe market; we’ll see how they get on. As is now fashionable at the moment, the announcement has a lot of ‘Cloud’ lard.

It is worth remembering that SUN has since been acquired by Oracle and their Mainframe re-hosting solution is now the CICS API on the front of Tuxedo.

February 17, 2012

I’ve been in correspondence with an old Transarc hand about how Encina‘s name was derived. I understand from him, and he writes as a former colleague of Jeff Eppinger, that Eppinger named Encina after a part of Stanford University, where he taught. That ‘Encina’ was derived from the common Castilian Spanish name for a large specimen of Quercus ilex, still found there. So I stand corrected.

Jim Troester, for it is he, also corrects my spelling of TOP END. It’s two words fully capitalised. I’ve now made the appropriate changes to pages elsewhere. I thank him for his feedback and I’m pleased to see somebody is still reading my ancient Transaction Management scribblings.

April 1, 2010

Things seemed to rather stagnant in the world of Tuxedo, Oracle had bought it, more or less by accident in purchasing Weblogic. They didn’t seem to know what it was or what to do with it. Today, and I don’t think it’s an ‘April Fool’, they’ve announced a new Tuxedo, branded in the Oracle way ’11g’. This does have new stuff, but some of it is actually old stuff that was in, then out, of previous releases. (more…)

While ratching around for further Tuxedo information, as seen above, it was noted that renewed prominence has been given to MessageQ. This Reliable Queue product was purchased by BEA from Digital (DEC), as was, a zillion Internet years ago (OK, 1997). It then got quietly forgotten about in the rush to Java at the turn of the millennium. But it now seems to have acquired a renewed prominence. Given what’s happened to Tuxedo recently, would an MQ Series API be far behind?

This was originally posted in the OLTP News section of the main ZOIS web-site.

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February 6, 2008

One of the announcements that has sneaked out at the Jboss jamboree is that there’s a plan for a ‘Tuxedo’ API (presumably ATMI or its ‘standardised’ clone XATMI) for the Jboss architecture. There’s nothing on any of JBoss‘s web-sites.

January 16, 2008

Oracle’s overtures now appear to have been accepted by BEA, with an offer of just over $19 a share. This has been given the green light by the BEA board and all should be a formality from here on. Oracle and BEA have directly competing products in the Java Middleware market, so expect some changes there, even if it is a mashup re-branding exercise. The future for Tuxedo is less clear, but hopefully it will be better that simply being a fossilised cash-cow.

This was originally posted in the OLTP News section of the main ZOIS web-site.

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A Web-based Subset Search for Universal Jobmatch

After some deliberation and in the face of sound council, a web-interface has been produced to the Universal Jobmatch Archive. It concerns itself with only a sub-set of the latest postings. Suck it and see.

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What’s the Author Up To

As he's a slide-rule ink-pen using freak in a modern world, you'll be interested to know that he's volunteered as a projectionist at the local independent cinema. These places depend upon heavily on the volunteer. And having made several clumsy helper contributions and observed how it's all done, he's now officially on rota. The occasional post about what he's shown makes its way to the side-bar.

It was my turn in the booth to project this little sad-fest. I can’t give to much away, for it’ll almost certainly be on TV, that it’s in 16:9 format rather suggested that. It tried hard not to be cliched, self-consciously so, but it was in the end. A cast of largely unknowns acquitted themselves […]

The Kirkgate’s Cinema nights now largely rely on BluRay disks run through substantial kit, sound-processors and big auditorium projectors. There’s very little of the traditional 35mm left. Belle was just such a Movie, delivered on a ‘domestic’ BluRay, such as you’d get from the shops, rather than a distributor special. Unfortunately it wouldn’t play, and […]

‘Twenty Feet from Stardom’ is a documentary about the world of the backing singer, who help to make or break a popular tunes and thereby the principal artists success. It largely focused three of a regular quintet that were behind a lot of successful Soul and R’n’B hits. They never sadly seem to quite make […]

On Monday I was once again in the Kirkgate to show ‘Rocket’. I would normally say ‘in the booth’, but we’re still down the front using a temporary replacement projector. Filmed entirely in Laos, in the language Lao, and probably largely in a highland dialect too, the film follows the fortunes of an ‘unlucky’ twin […]

Alan Turing was a clever man, he and the less celebrated Alonzo Church laid the foundations for computer science fundamentals in abstract discrete mathematics. Turing was also famous for a facetious, almost throw-away remark, made at a public meeting. He said that by the end of the decade we, humanity, would be building machines that […]